Sunday, July 12, 2015

To put it simply, I am suffering from clinical depression and anxiety disorder. I do not wish to elaborate on it anymore, but all I can say is that I am now getting help and writing this is, in a sense, a form of self therapy.

I have been carrying this plague-like illness for more than a year now. There were highs and lows, but worse came to worst by the end of March this year, culminating to this point of my darkest of days, where once again, I find myself threading the edge of this treacherous suicidal cliff.

To say it's hard to live like this is very limiting. The terrible dread every morning, the crippling sadness, the infinite dark thoughts continuously pounding inside your skull like a battalion of Orcs working their metals under the wild fires of hell.

I wish there are words to explain it. I wish there are ways I could explain how I'm feeling just so people can have an idea how it really feels having this. I wish I can just fire a gun pointing to my head and I will die instantly and nobody will know, nobody will get hurt, and the world will continue as it is not noticing anything. I wish there's another escape route like this. But I know there isn't. I wish someone would understand. But I know no one will.

There is little help you can get here in the Philippines when you have a mental illness like this. It is, after all, viewed as one of those things only First World countries suffer from. But what makes it even more difficult in my case is that it clashes with my other physical illnesses specifically gastritis.

A lot of people are now starting to notice that I'm losing weight and looking pale. No surprise there as I really can't eat properly. At times when I managed to take a few bites of food, I would vomit and will cry alone inside a locked restroom. Last month, after a week of almost no food intake, I had a mistake of taking a bite of Snickers offered by my office mate. Next thing I know, my chest felt heavy, I couldn't breathe, and I thought I was choking and dying. Apparently, it was another episode of heartburn.

Last Friday I had a panic attack after being confronted at work. I couldn't breathe again. I felt like two masses of brick walls were trying to smash my head and it was going to explode anytime soon. I thought my heart and stomach were forcing their way out of my mouth. The air was tight but damp and cold. My visions became blurry, wavy hazy scenes that left me even frazzled, shaking in fear. That night, I slept in the middle of me praying the rosary in Latin.

The only thing that makes me calm nowadays is seeing my family or burying myself under my sheets and pillows at home. I wanted to quit work, but I couldn't. I just can't right now. I want to leave and go far, somewhere where no one would recognize me. But I can't right now. I want to die. But I can't.

I write this now to put it out there that I have a problem. I write this like a message in a bottle thrown into the open sea in the hopes that should someone come across it and he/she happens to be suffering from the same demons I have, he/she would know that he/she is not alone. I write this in the hopes that should I overcome this immense trial, I'll have a testament, a proof that once I went through such perilous storm and I made it, I survived. But if I don't and I succumbed to this illness slowly gnawing at every fiber of hope and happiness that's left in me, I wish those who would read this would know that somehow, despite the odds, despite the vastness of it all, I tried. I fought. And there was nothing tragic with what took me in. And that once, I lived.